[skMed]

I would prefer the image to look identical. Each host is going to have a unique name, and you're going to outsource your routing/discovery to the Client/another service anyway right?

Generally though, if there is some custom config data that must be passed on BOOTSTRAPPING the node, you can use templated values for user-data on cloud-init based systems, or the remote_exec provisioner. This can even include the modified shard name (with count). If you're talking about updates AFTER the machine has been in service, I do not believe this is 'officially' supported by Terraform but it can be done [0]. You may want to look into a proper CM tool w/ idempotency for that sort of thing (Chef, Salt, etc.)

0: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/37865979/terraform-how-to...

[arjie]

Oh, no, definitely the former approach. All right. That sounds perfectly all right to me. I was wondering if there was a different way people did things.